The Daylight Marriage

by Heidi Pitlor

  “OK.” Ethan returned to the table and began to sketch a square on the robot’s chest, a door or a control panel.

  The din of people and cars and reporters outside the house swelled. The blue lights of a police cruiser flashed against the side of the white refrigerator, on and off, on and off. They had come back. The reporters already knew—hell, they had probably found out before he had.

  Chapter 16

  Hannah was alone on the beach now except for that man sitting down the way. He got up and began walking toward her. Handsome, he was handsome, and blood sped at the center of her chest.

  “You’re cold,” he said as he approached, and she nodded. She turned toward her car. “You want to wear my sweatshirt?” he called after her. He offered her a dark blue sweatshirt with “University of Massachusetts” silk-screened across the front. It was a strange gesture, a commitment if she had taken him up on it. He looked too old to be in college. He might have been in his mid- to late thirties. Thirty-seven?

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I should go.” Maybe Mrs. Keller would come into the shop today and entertain them with stories of her two sisters who had just gotten jobs at the Franklin Park Zoo, or maybe one of the girls at the store had gone on a date. Maybe something unexpected would happen.

  “I should get going too,” he said. “I’m already late for work.” He kept his eyes on hers.

  “What do you do?” she asked in order to end the silence.

  “University,” he said, wagging the sweatshirt in his hands, and she understood that he was a graduate student or a professor.

  They walked together toward the parking lot. She wondered which car was his—the beat-up Volkswagen, the Chevy? He turned to glance at her face every few seconds, and she became aware that she was being assessed. She was used to this, but now it was not an unpleasant sensation. She half smiled at him.

  “Could you give me a ride?” he asked.

  “Where?” The train was nearby, she was sure.

  He smiled. “UMass?”

  “Of course.” But she would be too late for work. Then again, she might be late even without this detour. She could tell the girls she hadn’t gotten the latest schedule.

  He smiled again. Yes, she saw him thinking, yes. She was pretty.

  But he was a stranger and this was Southie, and she said, “Sorry, I can’t. I’m late for work too.”

  “Huh,” he said. He lifted his arms and slipped on his sweatshirt. “All right, no worries. I’ll take the T.”

  She thought that UMass had to be only a few T stops away. He watched her hug her purse to her side and drop her eyes. She must have reeked of uptight suburbia. She had become the sort of person who was actually nervous in a city, the sort that she had once mocked—she had become a sort, period, and it had been so long since she had surprised even herself. “Well, why not? Come on.” She went to unlock the passenger door and walked around the back of the car. She got in the driver’s seat and he pulled his sweatshirt sleeves down over his fingers to warm himself. “What’s your job?” he asked.

  “I work in a flower shop.”

  He said, “You work with dead things? Things that have been cut from their roots and stuck in vases so people can look at them for the last week of their lives.”

  She laughed. “I’ve never thought of it that way. What’s your job?”

  “I teach.”

  “What subject?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This way?” she asked, gesturing to the left when she had reached the edge of the lot, and he nodded.

  He did not look like any professor that she ever had. Cars idled in a line of traffic perpendicular to them. Someone leaned on a horn, and she rose nearly a foot in her seat. Driving in Boston was the worst. Why had she even come here? She glanced at him and then back at the traffic. He was lean, at least leaner than Lovell, his face more defined and objectively more attractive. What a terrible thought to have. He looked more like a surfer than a professor—maybe he taught something like art. “Art? Or music?”

  “Bingo.”

  “No. Really?”

  “Music theory,” he said, and she smiled, oddly proud.

  “You play an instrument?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re one of these people who plays them all.”

  He nodded. “Guilty.” He curled his sleeve further inside his hand like a mitten and pressed the “on” button on the CD player, and Janine’s Beethoven began. He turned the volume nearly all the way up, and the steering wheel pulsed in her hands. “It should be loud. You should be able to feel the notes in your veins.”

  “Maybe. I guess I’m tired of this CD. It’s my daughter’s. She plays it constantly.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And she’s nothing like you.”

  “Not really. Hey, I can barely hear you,” she said, and she turned down the music.

  “What is your daughter like?”

  Hannah did not want to talk about that. “Do you love your job?” she asked him.

  He directed her around a small rotary and onto another road. “Sometimes.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The bureaucratic bullshit. The students don’t always listen to me. They stare right through me like I’m this inanimate object—a plant or a chair.” He tapped his shoe against the dash. “What’s your name?” he asked, and she said, “Hannah. And you?”

  “James. Jamie.”

  “You don’t look like a James,” she said.

  “What about Jamie?”

  She shrugged, and he said, “What’s your husband’s name?”

  “Lovell,” she said. Was this a betrayal? It felt like a small one.

  “Do you call him Love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you love him or because the word is a part of his name?”

  Some membrane between them was missing, one that typically separated her from other people. “That’s not your business,” she said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You’re pretty, you know.”

  Her face filled with heat. “Let’s get you to work,” she said.

  He leaned over to eject the CD and found a station playing jazz, some moony song, a single piano and then trumpets and trombones whining, the deep morass of a tuba. Nothing she would typically listen to. Lovell’s father adored the stuff. She glanced at the clock and thought that the girls at the shop would have called her at home by now—they did not have her cell phone number. Without traffic, she would be only a half hour late. She would drop him off and then get right on the Pike and call them from her cell, drive directly to work.

  “You look like your name,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “I like it. Hannah, means ‘grace,’ right? I have a cousin Hannah. She’s a nurse for kids with cancer in Seattle. She’s something else.”

  They had reached the campus, and to their right, empty wooden benches overlooked the water. A buoy drifted near the shore and a seagull pecked at it, then lifted into the air. A couple of men in waders were pulling a boat to shore, probably for the winter.

  “All right,” she said. “I guess this should be good-bye.”

  Chapter 17

  Karen Mekenner called Lovell soon after the arm bone was found to tell him that she and some other moms wanted to plan a vigil for Hannah. “When we heard the news, we thought that someone in town had to do something. I already got permission from a guy I know at Parks and Rec to use the town green. And I’m talking to Pastor McGrew over at Saint Patrick’s later this afternoon about saying a few prayers. I mean, I know you guys didn’t go there, right?”

  “We don’t go to church,” he said. “I—well, Hannah was raised Catholic.”

  “Perfect then!” Karen said. “It’d be nice for you to say a few things too, Lovell.”

  Despite how it may have sounded, the discovery of that arm bo
ne was not in fact news about Hannah. There would be no match for a good long while. How many bodies had turned up in South Boston over the years, men and women both? The detective, Lovell himself, all these people outside the house—no one knew anything at all. This was how he presented the nonnews to the kids, and even Janine seemed stunned enough to want to believe him. This was how he defined it to his parents and Hannah’s and to her sister.

  The thought of Karen’s gathering made Lovell want to crawl into his bed and refuse all contact with the world at large, but he knew he had to attend.

  ON THE EVENING of the vigil, he and the kids moved toward the front of a group of fifty or so others—Hannah’s coworkers and friends in town, a few regular customers from the shop, her dentist, their car mechanic, dozens of people he did not recognize. A small, makeshift platform had been set up with a microphone for those who wanted to say something. It was a bitterly cold November night, and Lovell wished he had thought to wear a scarf and hat. He had agreed to read a Dickinson poem and took the xeroxed copy from his pocket. He did not have the heart to read one of her favorites, those plucky, morbid poems that danced with questions of illness and death. He had been glad to come upon a more hopeful verse, and with a lump in his throat, he read:

  Our share of night to bear,

  Our share of morning,

  Our blank in bliss to fill,

  Our blank in scorning.

  Here a star, and there a star,

  Some lose their way.

  Here a mist, and there a mist,

  Afterwards—day!

  It sounded almost ironic now. When he had read it aloud at home, he had found it poignant but hopeful, and right for the occasion. Somewhat embarrassed, he moved back from the microphone and wrapped his arms around the kids’ shoulders. He watched a line of women sing “Amazing Grace.” Karen Mekenner stood next to the head of the PTO at Ethan’s school. As they sang, the women cupped their hands around white taper candles that they held, trying to shield the flames. Here they stood, these pleasant, “athletic stay-at-home moms” who had scraped against Hannah’s sense of herself, who had not mirrored what she had wanted them to; here they stood, their faces on the ground, already grieving her, this woman whom they hardly knew. They were innocuous and lovely, nearly heartbreaking in all their naïveté and kindness.

  Sophie and her husband appeared at the back of the group with their eyes trained on the ground. She wore a long trench coat and, from what he could see, a colorful silk scarf. Her short black hair had grown out somewhat. She was petite and stood only to her husband’s shoulders. Lovell imagined her watching him up front on the platform, the kids on either side of him. From where she stood, it would appear that he was the one leading the vigil tonight.

  A priest stepped forward and began to recite a prayer. Everyone bowed their heads as they took in his words. Hannah’s attachment to Catholicism had grown tenuous, but it remained fundamental to her. They had married, against his initial wishes, at Saint Margaret on Martha’s Vineyard, where she had gotten confirmed so many years ago. “I like the sense that someone else is responsible for us as a couple—that we’re not totally alone in this thing that so many people have failed at.”

  “But remember, you’re marrying a nonbeliever.”

  She replied, “We’re not going to Vegas or some random justice of the peace.”

  “I didn’t say we should do that.”

  “You got to decide about the proposal. You up and asked me right there on my parents’ boat. We’d never even talked about it.”

  “What an awful thing to do, propose.”

  She only rolled her eyes. “I just want to have a say. I want to make some of the decisions.”

  “Do you even—” he began. “Do you want to marry me?”

  “I don’t want to not marry you,” she said. “Hey—I don’t want you to walk away from me. I don’t want to leave.” She shook her head. “My parents have already booked the church. Forget I said anything. I want to get married. I do.”

  He had thought that he would never meet anyone else like her. He loved her. He wanted her to be his wife, and he wanted to no longer worry about whether she would leave him.

  JANINE CONTINUED TO spend afternoons next door with the neighbors, when she did not have viola lessons or orchestra practice. She began to adopt what he assumed were Stephen’s mannerisms and sayings. She complained about her “butch but hetty” art teacher. She complained about Lovell’s cooking, his clothing, the fact that he needed “mad grooming.” Her comment about Jeff and Stephen’s wanting to have a baby began to gnaw at him again.

  He made himself just come out and ask her one evening: “How is it that you plan to help Stephen and Jeff with their baby?”

  She reached for a pear in the bowl on the kitchen table. “You are shitting yourself right now, aren’t you?”

  “Well?”

  “It’s my body. I get to make my own choices.”

  His own body went cold. “You already proved that when you cut off all your hair. Listen, you just turned fifteen. You are a kid. And you live in my house and I am the adult here.”

  She licked her front teeth. “It’s just sad that not everyone in our country gets to make their own choices.”

  “Have you talked to them about it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “When?”

  “When I feel like it.”

  “Will you at least think seriously about it?” Lovell said.

  “I am doing that. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Well, frankly, this would be an idiotic decision.”

  “Just because they’re gay doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to have kids.”

  He felt himself grow warm. “Can’t they adopt? Why the hell is this your responsibility?”

  “Because they’re my friends. They’re more than friends—I love them.”

  “You love them?” He rolled his eyes. “You love them. Come on.”

  “Yes, I love them, and they really want a baby. And no, they don’t want to adopt. They want the baby to have at least some of their genes.”

  Maybe this was a fantasy for her, one that they would hopefully never entertain. She’d had plenty of fantasies before. After 9/11, she had threatened to run away because he and Hannah refused to drive her down to New York to help search through the World Trade Center wreckage for bodies. A year earlier, she had begged him and Hannah to let a new kid at her school move into their house, a kid who lived with his family at a homeless shelter in the next town. She was always trying to fight some cause or injustice in some completely absurd, if touching, way.

  He said, “Jeff and Stephen also might not want the baby to have a teenage mother who lives next door. Would you—” he began. “Would you mind if I had a talk with them?”

  “Shit. Yes, I would. You barely even know them. I don’t want my daddy marching over there.”

  He sighed. He looked over at her.

  “Don’t even think about going over there without telling me, bitch,” she said.

  “You did not just call me that. I’m not your bitch.”

  “Oh, please,” she groaned.

  “I am not gay—and I don’t think you are either, you know.” He couldn’t help himself.

  Chapter 18

  If you wouldn’t mind, the building is just around that bend.” Jamie gestured toward an adjacent parking lot.

  “Now where?” Hannah asked. She waited for his reply. “Hey, I’m already going to be late for work.”

  She finally pulled into a spot facing the harbor and shifted into park. “You’re going to be late too,” she said. “Right?”

  He leaned his head back against the seat and inhaled through his nose. “It’s Mingus,” he said. “Young Duke. He asked his shrink to write the liner notes for this record.” The song ended and another came on, a discordant piece that made Hannah edgy as she always was with this sort of music, th
e unpredictable beat, those sudden stops and starts. He went on: “My folks sent me to a shrink a couple times when I was a kid, but the man was kind of boring. I felt bad for him, really.”

  She half turned toward him.

  “I’m sorry. Why would you care about that? I guess I must not want to work today. I must be trying to stall, going on and on as if someone like you would have any interest.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “You don’t exactly project instability.”

  “Really? I’ve been in therapy. The last time was a few years ago, once my kids were old enough and I had the time,” she said. “It didn’t take. The doctor was a lot younger. I think she found me boring.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t abused or anything. I wasn’t anorexic or bulimic or schizophrenic.”

  “What were you?”

  She thought a moment. “Me.”

  “That woman wasn’t bored. She was jealous,” he said. He turned to her. His eyes moved from one side of her face to the other. “Why do you sell flowers?”

  No one had ever asked her this, not even Lovell. “I don’t know. I’ve done it since college. I used to deliver them.”

  “Because it made people happy when they opened their doors and saw you holding all those flowers?”

  “Could be.”

  His fingers fiddled beneath his sleeves, and his feet tapped as if an explosive were hidden just beneath his surface. “Do you like me?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t know you.” Her hands grew cold against the steering wheel. She gradually lowered them along the smooth circle until they rested at either end of its diameter.

  “People know these things within seconds. They know who they like and who they don’t and who they trust.” At last he looked away. “I like you.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t dislike you,” she said.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable.”

  She half shrugged. She did not want to agree with him, nor did she want to disagree.

  “I still have a few more minutes before class starts. Let’s take a quick walk down by the water. You can’t beat the view here.” He unlatched his seat belt. “You want to call your work and tell them you’ll be a few minutes late?”